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Comment by besterman23 | Hacker News Reader

I suppose you could say, hypothetically, that if the field were “solved” then the protection of the feelings and sense of need for human understanding of the now obsolete practitioners might hinder any benefits that the now solve field could provide.

The answer to this is probably just “get out of the way” and then your “work” would be to develop a better appreciation of what has been produced.

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> The answer to this is probably just “get out of the way” and then your “work” would be to develop a better appreciation of what has been produced.

They aren't in the way. AI labs can do their own math all they want, and nobody is stopping them. Rather, mathematicians are simply speaking about the topic.

So is the answer that they should just shut up?

They absolutely are in the way. We’ve had the most exciting months of mathematical progress since antiquity, and the vast majority of voices from mathematicians have been bitching about one thing or the other, to the extent that they now got themselves a committee that (co-)decides when, how, and possibly if, the next batch of results is made available to the public.

Please. Have you been doing mathematics ? Yes, some big open problems are solved. I have not seen the ideas therein used to solve related or other problems. That is the point of most mathematics: to develop frameworks and general techniques for understanding and solving problems, not solving one-off problems.

For example, group theory lead to a useful way of thinking about how to solve a wide array of problems. That is what mathematicians are seeking.

People merely speaking their mind does not constitute getting in the way.

I'm sorry that you personally don't like that mathematicians are "bitching" about OpenAI snaking their work out from under them, and would like to silence them. But if we're going for consistency's sake, maybe consider taking your own advice here before giving it to others.

In the meantime, OpenAI can do whatever they want, mathematically-speaking. Nobody is in their way. If there isn't further meaningful progress from them, that would seem to strengthen the work-product-theft hypothesis.

> the feelings and sense of need for human understanding of the now obsolete practitioners might hinder any benefits that the now solve field could provide

Wiping out an occupation that people enjoy and that gives them purpose (making them "obsolete") is a public mental health crisis, if anything. It's unclear that the "benefits" of the "solved" field actually outweigh that.

If LLMs could both prove any relevant theorem, explain such a theorem cogently and lay the groundwork for further theory, I don't see how any way mathematicians could stand in the way of that.

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